Four months on, jump shots coming up short
Hello all,
It’s been four months now since my surgery, so I guess it’s time for an update, although not that much is new since my last update a month ago.
As then, I can do pretty much whatever I want, short of high impact activities. The single-leg calf raises are better, but still not as high as the normal leg, especially when I get toward the end of a set of 30 lifts. A month ago, my heel went down to the ground between lifts, but now it stays up and bounces for the whole set. I still do the eccentric contraction exercises, mainly to work on strength at the dorsiflexed end of the calf’s range of motion, which I’ve learned is usually the slowest part to come back. On the basketball court, I can shoot a jump shot again, but it doesn’t feel natural yet, as the normal lift isn’t there. My vertical jump is about 12 inches, where it was about 18 before the injury. (Thirty years ago it was 30 inches, I try not to think about that.) On the bike, a month ago I was getting out of the saddle, but it still felt a little forced. Now, it’s second nature again and feels strong. Biking is entirely back to normal now.
I read the notes here and so often feel bad for those suffering along with casts and boots and various aches and pains and inconveniences for so many weeks. I continue to wonder if more people can have a quicker and virtually painless recovery like mine. (My long 4/29 note has all the boring details.) How did I get down that path safely, other than the obvious point that my doctor doesn’t use casts or boots? Was I just plain lucky not to rerupture with my relatively aggressive rehab? (Even so, I wonder if I could have pushed the strength work harder in the first few weeks, in retrospect.) Am I genetically blessed with good healing? Do I have some fortunate instinct for how hard to push without going too far? More likely, (and this is my hope), I’m not unusual in some obscure way, so the path I took could be taken safely by many others. I really don’t know, but with an autistic teenager in the family who needs lots of extra care, my wife was glad I was able to get back to helping again quickly, whatever the reason.
Heal, get flexible, and get strong everyone!
Doug
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I think you’ve got good genetics man. Not that you ruptured it, but obviously since you’ve come back so strong so quick. It’s been 5 months and I couldn’t think of stepping back onto a basketball court.
When mine popped, I just limped off of the court knowing that I had a bit of rehab ahead of me. No crying, no whining. But it has been the slowest comeback of any injury that I’ve had (relative to average recovery goals).
You’re right about the first two weeks though. To tell you the truth, I believe that had I been able to massage the wound, scar tissue that is still stuck to the skin, my recovery would have been much quicker. I’m walking without much of a limp now, but strength comes at a painful price. The rupture didn’t hurt as much as calf sets each night…
Hi Aaron,
I’m “on the basketball court” figuratively, not literally. I’m just shooting at the hoop in my driveway. There is no way I would risk a real basketball game now. At 53 years old, I think this injury is my signal to give up basketball. I still have biking and skijoring to keep me busy.
There is no way to check if it’s lucky genes or pushy rehab that got me here. What would come close, though, is if many others could duplicate my experience. Even that has a big problem, though, because most of those who might be willing to try are locked up in casts for weeks.
Good luck getting that calf strength back,
Doug
Hi again Aaron,
I dashed off my first reply in a bit of a hurry, and didn’t talk about those “first two weeks” that you mentioned.
Regarding loosening up the scar tissue, that mostly happened for me around three weeks postop, when I transitioned from shuffling along with my injured foot out front to walking almost normally. Just walking around in my shoes was my primary therapy for that issue, although the stretching before that had to get me to the point where I could shuffle in the first place.
More important for the later, strength part of recovery, I really think doing at least something with that calf muscle very early on is important. I remember reading someone quoting their doctor saying that for every week of inactivity, a month is added onto the strength rehab at the end. My hunch is that’s about right. I didn’t push the strength work that hard, and still had a pretty fast recovery of calf strength, (holding all my weight up on my injured foot’s toes by nine weeks, for example). By not pushing the strength work that hard, I mean that I was stretching with the strength of my tibialis anterior muscle starting at five days postop, but didn’t work my calf against that same resistance until four weeks out. I could have pushed the strength work more, without straining the tendon any more than I already was with my stretching. At any rate, I think a little strength work early on makes the later strength rehab quicker, and probably less painful, too.
My hope is that Achilles tendon rehab will go through an evolution that my own field of extremely premature baby intensive care has gone through. When I did my training in the mid-1980s, tiny premature babies were kept on ventilators and fed only intravenously for weeks, because we thought the lungs and the intestines were too immature to do otherwise. We have learned that those little preemies are capable of much more than we thought back then. Even the earliest preemies can often get off the ventilator and start taking some milk in the first days of life, and they do better as a result. My willingness to challenge the “be afraid” assumptions that currently dominate ATR rehab come from that experience. The “right answers” that doctors have change over time, usually for the better. It’s like that quote of Martin Luther King’s we heard recently, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Medicine getting to the truly best treatment is like that, too.
Okay, I’ll stop preaching now.
Best wishes,
Doug